What follows is a personal philosophy of writing (or making anything, really). There is so much to say on this topic that it could easily be a book — if there is a part of this article you think is worth additional detail, feel free to leave a note in the comments.

In the last few years I have had very many conversations with students about the act of writing. The context leading to these conversations is usually one of the following:

1. The student/s are figuring out how to write research theses (usually while learning the research ropes at the same time).
2. The student/s have multiple pieces of written assessment due on the same date (case in point, my current education students have an average of 6000 words due across three courses, all at 3pm on August 4th).

My own observation is that attempts to help students deal with such tasks usually hinge on technical knowledge — the idea is that providing genre-specific information (e.g. a formula for essay structure) will help students to produce the corresponding kind of work.

What seems to-be less discussed (outside of creative writing circles) is the significance of the subjective dimension to writing.

A brief philosophical aside: In this case, I’m using the word subjective to refer to the personal realm of experience — I am understanding subjectivity (emphasis on the ‘ity’) as a personal process unfolding through time that mediates what happens (i.e. what the students actually does, when they sit down to write).

Small perfectionism rant

The subjective dimension matters because this is the engine room of the creative process that actually results in the pieces of writing that these students will eventually submit.

Subjectivity is also the bastion of perfectionism. A key issue with perfectionism is that it prevents students (and the rest of us!) from actually finishing things. Worth noting is that one doesn’t need to self-identify as a perfectionist to feel perfectionistic inclinations (e.g. “wow, that’s a crap sentence, I’ll just delete that and come up with something better before I move on”).

Here are some things that I think can be used to resolve this tension.

Setting expectations

Setting expectations about the practice of writing can help in regulating how one feels about it when in the thick of things.

Concretely, it is worth noting that there is no single recipe to success in most genres of writing. This can be an uncomfortable thought if you’re used to having scaffolds provided (e.g. “use headings x, y, and z to structure the essay”). While we can observe general features of genre based on observation of historical events (e.g. what we have decided to call an essay in the recent past), the fact is usually that is no single, precise set of steps that will yield a successful (or poor) outcome.

One solution to this is immersion in exemplars that the local community largely agrees upon in terms of their quality.

The diversity of ways in which a good example of work can exist helps to illustrate how perfectionism constitutes a deficit discourse. The practice of writing can be understood as about crafting something that rises to the occasion, rather than finding the solution. If the solution is presented as a single, ostensibly perfect exemplar, then perfection is paradoxically unattainable, since it would require direct plagiarism of that once exemplar (anything else would be less perfect, after all).

Similarly, presenting an abstract framework (e.g. a description of genre features) as a model of perfection sets an unattainable bar.

The main reason for this is that a framework is not equivalent to the corresponding piece of work (e.g. a concept map of essay structure is not the same as an essay; even an essay about essay structure is not the same essay we usually ask of students). The risk here is in claiming that a perfect qualitative standard exists, when the game (in education) is usually a quantitative one (i.e. achievement on a fixed scale). That written tasks are by definition flexible should be clearly established.

(Note that this is not a critique of abstract frameworks, only of a certain way in which they might be used).

Defining drafting clearly

To my mind, drafting is under-discussed in higher education courses — it is usually falls in the mysterious bag of ‘assumed knowledge’.

The key point is this: a draft is not meant to be the finished product. To put an even finer point on it; a draft is not meant to be the same as the draft that came before or which will come after. It is a moment in a progression.

In my definition, drafting is a three-phase process.

1. The first draft is in the first moment in which the subjective engine of the individual produces something durable (usually a mark on a page or screen, but it is worth noting that thoughts have durability too).
2. The second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc.) drafts occur when the first draft is actively stored as a previous draft. The definition is in the decision of the individual here. When working digitally, this might be in the action of replicating the work (e.g. by saving a fresh copy of a file). If working in an analogue way, it might mean tucking a stack of papers to the side with a sticky note on them that says ‘draft #1’. If working mentally, it might mean actively saying to oneself, “that bit of thinking is my first draft”.
3. The last draft is the last draft. We tend to recognise it only after it has happened.

Deciding that the first draft will be the last draft is usually a hard way to go (unless the artefact in question is a very brief email or text message, perhaps), since it promotes relentless self-censorship.

The reason for this is that the act of writing usually produces instant feedback — we tend to see what we have written right away. Unless we are prepared, we might react without thinking (e.g., by mashing the backspace key). The cost here is that we switch prematurely from a process of drafting to one of editing.

Countering the tendency to edit prematurely

One way to put the editing tendency on hold is to practise seeing oneself on the page.

The best way to do this that I’m aware of (based purely on my own experience) is free-writing. Free-writing is basically the process of writing whatever comes out in a stream of consciousness sort of way. The good thing about rambling on the page is that we have an opportunity to practise observing what we have made without applying any strict expectations about quality to it — try this before you judge its effectiveness.

Some things that help with free-writing

1. Set a timer (to prove a sense of closure to the exercise; start with one minute if you’ve never free-written before).
2. Write very quickly; faster than you feel you can think, even.
3. Do not use the backspace key.

The point is to stay in motion

Alongside the opportunity to practise looking in the metaphorical mirror, free-writing is also a good opportunity to develop a tacit knowledge of what it means to write fast.

Being able to write fast is helpful because it can help to produce draft material quickly. This, in turn, is useful because having a draft (even a mental one) is the only way to extend one’s thinking on a topic. Drafting is basically self-reflective learning in action.

For this reason, if we don’t know what comes next, we may as well write something and see where that leads — try writing “bacon and eggs” next time you get stuck.

Some ways to stay in motion

When putting pen to paper, hand to keyboard, or mind to thought, there are some useful ways to keep things moving when drafting feels like wading through sludge.

• As above, do not use the backspace key until the first draft has been archived (the point, especially at the beginning, is to get to the next draft as quickly as possible).
• Try writing in dot points — this helps to relieve the self-expectation that one needs to produce complete sentences and/or paragraphs.
• To find order, try comparing one dot point to another and asking, “which should come first?”
• Try limiting the writing either to questions or statements that imply some sort of position — later on , this is not a bad policy for working headings. The idea here is that these types of statements provoke a more specific response than do free-floating key words (what can be said in response to a free-floating word of relevance — say, ‘validity’; almost anything!).
• Moving frequently from one draft to the next can help to provide personal permission to delete content with abandon (i.e. avoiding a sunk-cost scenario).
• Set a timer, to know that there is an end to the whole thing.

A point about waiting as a resource for staying in motion

I’ve mentioned a few times above that drafting can be a mental process too.

It should be clear by now that this article general argues for drafting as a process of discovery. Once we’re comfortable doing this on the page, we can try allowing some of this to go by in the mind. Rather than capturing everything that comes along (as in pure free-writing) we are now sifting for relevant things.

If we’ve calibrated our expectations appropriately, one useful approach is to practise actively waiting for relevant ideas to come down the mental stream.

Try sitting with a pen and a blank sheet of paper (and nothing else; especially not a smart phone) for five minutes with a particular topic in mind (perhaps an essay question). You might experience an initial moment of tension — what should you put on the page? Once a little time elapses, it turns out to be very difficult to think of nothing worth writing (and if only irrelevant things come up, write them down).

My hunch is that this approach can work because there is not an equal probability of any possible thought occurring to us.

Put another way, we are more likely to think some things than other things. Part of the reason for this is that we have been exposed to some things more than other things. If we are writing an essay, for example, the books or papers (or conversations) we have had in the past influence this reservoir of possible thinkings.

For similar reasons, it is worth noting that we can feed this reservoir; with reading or listening material certainly, but also with other things (e.g. the specific experience of sitting to write at a sunny park bench, or in a corner of a library).

The end

The point of writing this article was to get down some long-standing thoughts about the subjective side of writing (especially as applicable to the student context).

I have largely avoided touching on technical specifics. This is not because I do not think technical specifics are not important (emphatically, they are), but because I feel the subjective side of the process to be largely under-discussed. The point, to my way of thinking, is that the subjective aspect of writing regulates our ability to access a posture of curiosity within the drafting process.

If this is useful, or there is something you feel is worthy of further attention, please leave a comment — this will help me to direct future writing in a useful way.